Mobile computing devices, vehicles, appliances, industrial equipment, and other types of Internet-enabled devices are becoming seemingly ubiquitous. Such devices typically offload computational workload so as to preserve power and/or compute resources, typically also depending on wireless communications which are latency sensitive to transfer collected information from and receive computational result information to the devices. While modem computing systems continue to trend toward cloud-based servers performing the necessary computations/storage and a wireless network infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of data, there can be undesirable latencies associated with such an approach. As such, more computation supporting devices have moved out of/away from the cloud and closer to the primary devices themselves.
Such edge architectures leverage servers, applications, and small clouds (e.g., cloudlets) at the edge of the traditional network in order to perform data processing nearer to the source of the data. For example, multi-access edge computing (MEC) is one such edge network architecture that enables cloud computing capabilities at the edge of a cellular network, which provides a highly distributed computing environment that can be used to deploy applications and services as well as to store and process content in close proximity to mobile users. However, physical space restrictions can often limit the amount of compute and storage which can be made available at the edge device, potentially inhibiting scale.